Store

Saturday, 3 February 2018

Household 3D Prints Roundup 2

LED candle shrouds

Been a while since I covered prints that I've put around the house, so here's some of the stuff that's been made over the past year. Starting with the above, those are simple spiral vase prints that have a small LED tea light inside for decoration. Design wise, they're really simple, just a faceted cylinder with lots of extra horizontal rings twisted along it's vertical axis, I used Wings 3D 2.1.5 as my design program of choice here. Filament is MG Chemicals Gold PLA, prints look like natural beeswax in colour, really nice for making decorative shades and such.

Toothbrush Holders

Not the kind of thing you'd expect to use transparent PLA vase-mode prints for, but the faceted spiraling makes them surprisingly sturdy for this kind of use. Again, custom designs done in Wings 3D, using 3D Solutech Natural PLA this time, all printed on the Mega Kossel.

Birdseed filter in use

Birdseed filter clean

Birdseed filtering funnel

Next up is something bird related, I've got a couple of budgies that are rather picky eaters, they don't like large sunflower seeds and keep emptying the food dish onto the floor if the find them. My solution to the problem is to design a funnel with a removable filter grate that strains the largest seeds out but lets all of the smaller stuff through. It's a simple design, just a cone with a 2 cm cylinder stuck on the point and hollowed out to about 3mm thick walls, the real trick is that rather than modeling the final grill in the CAD software, I just modeled the outer dimensions for it and used the infill settings in my slicer software to create the grid. I'm using Slic3r for my slicing program and the filter grid is the result of using 10% rectangular infill with zero top and bottom layers.

Towel hook on bathroom door

And finally, this is the current iteration of the Customisable U-Hook from Thingiverse that's being used as a towel hook on the bathroom door. It's printed in MG Chemicals PETG for strength, the previous ones were in PLA and both snapped after about 6-9 months of daily use, this one is currently at 5 months and counting, be interesting to see how it holds up after a year of use. And in closing, I redid the oven knob from last time, the original part wasn't thick enough on the walls for the adaptor plug and failed after about a year of use. the current one was made in one piece with a thicker walled plug and is still going strong after about 9 months of regular use.